


Of Cabbages and Queens

by Artemis (Citrine)



Category: Raffles (TV 1977), Raffles - E. W. Hornung
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Spoilers for E.W. Hornung's 'The Gift of the Emperor'
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-02
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2019-05-17 07:26:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14827983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Citrine/pseuds/Artemis
Summary: Raffles surreptitiously rubbed his sore wrist. It was swollen and bruised under the grubby bandage. The result of too many months of back-breaking rock-breaking. It was his bowling hand, but they didn’t have a cricket team in the Scrubs and it would be healed by the time he went over the wall.





	Of Cabbages and Queens

**Author's Note:**

> Like many AU stories this one started with a 'what if', in this case what if Raffles never made it over the rail on the Uhlan into the Mediterranean... 
> 
> I hope you enjoy the results of that 'what if' question.
> 
> Thank you for reading.

“He’ll no turn Queen’s evidence. Truth be told I never thought that Mr Manders had the bottle, but I canna get a squeak out of him.” MacKenzie sighed. “The Home Secretary’s nay happy with me and I’m told that the Prime Minister and the Palace aren’t best pleased either.”

“It’s gonna look bad for all of us if we let them two crafty buggers slip through the net.” Detective Sergeant Micklewaite rested his elbow on Mackenzie’s filing cabinet.

He was too casual by half that one, with scant respect for his superiors, and dislike sharped MacKenzie’s tone. “There’s no chance of that. I found the black pearl on Raffles and Manders is undoubtedly an accomplice. Aye, that lad’s in it up to his neck, the trouble is we canna prove anything else again them. Raffles swears that it was a madcap scheme launched out of desperation and Manders won’t say anything at all.”

Micklewaite flexed his arm. “I could ‘ave a word with him, see if I could help him remember anything like.”

“No, I’ll not have it, that’s nay the way to treat a prisoner.” Micklewaite believed that the end justified the means and he wasn’t alone in that, but  but MacKenzie’s honest Presbyterian heart wouldn’t let him stoop so low. Not even to save his own skin. “I’ll know if ye try anything mind. Not that I think ye could beat a confession out of him. For all their wrongdoing they’ve both got that public schoolboy code of honour fixed in their daft heads. ‘I never once went back on a pal,’ Manders says to me, ‘and I’m not about to start now.’ And they’re tight those two.”

“Tight?” Micklewaite’s lip curled into an ugly sneer. “That’s one word for it, pair o’ bleedin’ nancies. I dunno why you won’t charge them with sodomy, that’s a good ten years for a start off.”

“I won’t charge them because we’ve nay any evidence!” shouted MacKenzie. “We’ve been through everything and we did nay find any incriminating letters or pretty poems, no more than we could find the tools of Mr Raffles' secret trade.”

“What about medical evidence?”

“I’ve had them examined, both of them, Manders twice, but it’s not conclusive. Even if it were he’d swear blind that he went down the East India docks and got rogered by half the merchant navy. He’d nay admit that Raffles had anything to do with it.”

“The jury would ‘ave to be bonkers to swallow that one. When you stick the circumstantial evidence with the medical stuff it’s bleeding obvious that-”

“It’s no obvious and even if it is we can nay prove it.” MacKenzie tried to keep a lid on his fiery temper. “By all accounts they’d hardly seen one another for months before they got on that boat and that wee lassie Mr Raffles was paying court to on the voyage muddies the waters. Aye, we may both think that it was a smokescreen and that he never had any intention of marrying the lass, but he was engaged to her and I wouldn’t put it past him to say that he stole the pearl for love. The public will lap that one up.”

“So charge them with indecency then, buggery even, if it don’t stick it’ll still put a doubt in people’s minds, no smoke without fire and all that.”

It made sense, but MacKenzie shook his head. “No, we’ll stick with the pearl.” He saw Micklewaite open his mouth to argue. “Be about your duties, Sergeant, and leave them to me.”

Micklewaite left with a glower of ill-concealed fury. MacKenzie slumped back in his chair. The man might be the rough-round-the-edges son of an East End costermonger, but he had made some good points. It would go worse for the two miscreants once the seed of doubt was sown and he didn’t doubt that they were guilty, of the burglary and the buggery, and he had no sympathy with either sin. Thou shalt not steal. Then there was Leviticus: Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is an abomination. So why not charge them?

Pride. His own indomitable pride. He had tracked Raffles for years before he had ever taken up with Manders. He had known that society’s cricketing darling was a thief and he’d never been able to prove a blasted thing. Save for the hollow triumph of the black pearl he still couldn’t and all those other crimes would go unpunished. Manders would get a year to eighteen months for his part in the robbery. Whist Raffles would get four or five years hard labour, not the twelve to fifteen year sentence he deserved. It was only a partial victory for the forces of law and order, and MacKenzie knew that he had been outwitted at the last.

*

Piety was to be expected from a chaplain. It was all cant of course, Raffles would have said so. Once he hadn’t been so sure, but nothing that had happened to Bunny over the past year had convinced him of the existence of a merciful and benevolent God. Or indeed of any God at all.

The reverend Ebenezer Bottomley cleared his long throat. “Unlike most of the poor wretches who have fallen from grace you had many advantages in life. Many would say that you have recklessly and wickedly squandered those advantages, but I believe that with neither family nor faith to sustain you were a lost sheep. Without a firm Christen foundation you were prey to all manner of evil influences.”

“Yes, sir.” Bunny wasn’t really listening. There wasn’t any need, once Bottomley got into his stride he could drone on for ages. The prison chaplain’s favourite theme was the sinner that repenteth and very rarely one of the inmates obliged, but he wasn’t going to be joining that select band. What was it Raffles had once said? That he would rob St Pauls if he could get away with it.

“You find something amusing?” snapped Bottomley. 

“No, sir, not in the least.”

Bottomley glared at him suspiciously from behind his thick round spectacles. “Regret, Manders, regret and remorse are the first steps on the road to redemption.”

“There are things that I regret. I made some bad decisions.” Bunny bit his chapped lip. Their estrangement had been his fault, all his fault. He had been the one who left Raffles. “I was a fool.”

Bottomley smiled. “I believe that you were, my son.”

Bunny itched to wipe that smug look off his face. Supercilious bastard. Old arseholes, that was what the other convicts called him. The epithet had rather shocked him at first, boring Bottomley was a man of the cloth after all, but it was amazing what eleven months in Pentonville did for one’s perceptions. Penal servitude had stripped away the last visages of his innocence and toughened him up in ways that life with Raffles never had. 

From the moment of their arrest on the Uhlan he’d had to survive alone. MacKenzie had them locked into separate cabins and they had only caught a brief glimpse of one another when they disembarked at Dover. “Remember,” Raffles had mouthed at him and despite everything which had gone before he had kept their devil’s pact.

“I disapprove of high church ways,” sniffed Bottomley, “but as the psalm says ‘Open confession is good for the soul. Nothing brings more ease and more life to a man than a frank acknowledgment of the evil which has caused the sorrow and the lethargy.’ Keep that in the forefront of your mind and ask yourself if there is anything you wish to tell me.”

“There’s nothing that springs to mind.” How gullible did Old Arseholes think he was? MacKenzie and that thug Micklewaite had tried every trick in the book to threaten or coax a confession out of him, but he had been adamant and iron. They had never known how temptation had gripped him in those long, sleepless nights in his icy cell. In furious imagination he had seen himself turning Queen’s evidence, damming Raffles in return for his own freedom.

He couldn’t do it, not in the grey light of the integration room. They had vowed not to incriminate each other and he would keep that promise whatever the consequences. 

“Are you sure?” asked Bottomley. “You said that you had regrets.”

Bunny nodded. “I was a fool,” he repeated. He had squandered the months they might have spent together before their arrest. His lapse into virtue as Raffles had called it, his fanciful notion of scratching an honest living by his pen, had almost destroyed their relationship. “I made a mistake, a terrible mistake.”

“Do you mean when you helped your friend steal the black pearl or are you referring to some other incident?”

“The pearl wasn’t my doing,” snapped Bunny. He clenched his jaw least his bitterness spill over into incriminating words. It had been Raffles. All Raffles with his tricks and his deceits. He had never wanted the bloody thing, any more than he had wanted Raffles to pay court to that simpering little bitch on the Uhlan. “I never expected things to turn out as they did.” He looked at Bottomley with despair in his eyes. “We weren’t supposed to end up in prison. It was a cruise, a holiday, a reunion.”

A honeymoon.

After a fashion at least. Raffles had proposed the voyage at the end of one of his rare visits to Bunny’s hideaway in Thames Ditton. The suggestion had come at the end of a perfect summer day spent idling on the river; a day on which they like the waters had been becalmed with never a cross word between them. Nevertheless he had tried to shield himself against disappointment; nothing would ever come of it, it had been a mere throwaway remark. Then he’d received a telegram from Raffles, closely followed by a letter which spoke of Capri and Italy, of basking in the sunlight and of fairylands forlorn. A love letter; one that he’d memorised before he’d burnt it for their own safety.

“When I went onboard I never imagined that it would be…such a disaster.”

Bottomley leant forward with his bony hands clasped on the desk. “You thought that you were embarking on an innocent sea voyage?”

Innocent was hardly the word for what he’d envisaged. Anything approaching the truth would probably give Bottomley an apoplexy and he had to be careful now. More that careful. “I suppose so. I don’t really remember, so much has happened since then.”

“Come now, you must remember what you thought. Your hopes. Your expectations.”

Indeed he did, in vivid erotic detail. “Not exactly. I just…Raffles said it would be all right.”

Bottomley frowned. “I fear that this friend of yours is not a good influence. It is perhaps fortunate that you are severed from his society.”

“Well, they were never going to-” Bunny choked off the furious retort. He hadn’t been naïve enough to believe that the authorities would allow them to share a cell, but he had hoped for the same prison where they might catch an occasional glimpse of one another in the exercise yard. “He’s doing five years in Wormwood Scrubs, so I’d call that jolly well severed, wouldn’t you?”

“Don’t be insolence, Manders. Your attitude does you no credit.”

“No, sir. Sorry, sir.” He hung his head to hide the glitter of resentment in his eyes.  

“You cannot truly believe that his punishment is unjust?”

Bunny shrugged. “Raffles knew the risk he was taking.”  Dangerous adventures had always appealed to Raffles whilst he had suffered agonies of nerves and sleepless nights, dreading the knock at the door or the policeman’s hand on his shoulder.  “I was the one who worried all the time – on the Uhlan, I mean – and tried to dissuade him.”

“Did you, by George?  I’m relieved to hear it, my son.” Bottomley rubbed his hands together like a gleeful miser gloating over his gold. “Such recalcitrance convinces me that you are not beyond salvation.”

“Then you are mistaken.” Bunny saw Bottomley’s delight turn to dismay, then to anger, but he was beyond caring.  He despised the man’s prattling about repentance and redemption. “I went to the devil a long time ago and I wouldn’t go back if I could. Raffles was always the brave one whilst I played the coward’s part, but the worse has happened now and I’ll survive it.  We both shall. Then we’ll be reunited and I wouldn’t exchange his companionship for all the glory of heaven.”

*

A little tent of blue prisoners call the sky. Wasn’t that what Wilde had said in that poem of his? Words to that effect anyway. Today it wasn’t even blue just a torn out rag of grey above the cabbage and carbolic reek of the prison kitchen.

Raffles swung the huge cast pot up onto the table. For a second his right wrist threatened to give way and the vessel landed with an ungainly thump on the rough wood. 

“Watch what you’re doing, ninety-seven!” The prison warder bellowed at him down the length of the cavernous kitchen. 

Raffles swore, low down, under his breath, mindful of the echo in the former stables. 

The old lag on the other side of the table grinned. “Don’t get too antsy, mister. He might be the one fer yer. He’s got a son, soft in the ‘ead in some fancy ‘ospital what costs more chink than he’s got. I know he done favours for a couple o’ lads, postin’ letters for a bit o’ garnish.”

“I want more than a letter posted, Beck.” Raffles didn’t even glance at the warder in question and like all illicit conversations between prisoners this one was conducted sotto-voce. “Although I may test his mettle out on one.” Writing to Bunny, who had finished his sentence six weeks ago, would be risky, but worthwhile if his plan paid off.

“He’ll post yer letter  for a bull.” Beck picked up another potato, holding it awkwardly in his knurled fingers. “Look lively with ‘em spuds, he’s got his beady eye on us.” 

“Has he indeed?” If the young warder was desperate enough to risk instant dismissal and possible imprisonment for five shillings then he might be persuaded to turn a blind eye for a much larger sum. “So there’s him, and you, who else?”

“I never said I was in.” Beck shook his head. “It’s proper dodgy. If yer miss you’ll break yer bleedin’ neck and I won’t get nothing.”

“I won’t miss.” Raffles surreptitiously rubbed his sore wrist. It was swollen and bruised under the grubby bandage. The result of too many months of back-breaking rock-breaking. It was his bowling hand, but they didn’t have a cricket team in the Scrubs and it would be healed by the time he went over the wall. “And even if I did my friend will see that you’re paid.”

“Yer friend, him wot was in Pentonville with Clarkie?” Beck made an obscene gesture. “Proper mandrake, ain’t yer?”  He chortled, but his grin faded when Raffles stared at him with ice-cold contemptuous eyes. “Not that you ain’t a bleedin’ nasty piece o’ work.”

“Then you might be well-advised to help me.”

“I dunno. I got-” Beck started peeling potatoes as if his life depended on it. “Turnkey.”

Raffles kept his head down as prison officer Parish approached them. The man might be open to bribery, but it wouldn’t do to antagonise him, so he carried on diligently scrapping half black potatoes when Parish stopped behind him. He had been a model prisoner since his incarceration, but they still kept him under close surveillance. Gentlemen cracksman who might or might not be sodomites were not to be trusted. 

He glared at Beck’s bowed head. How dare the old reprobate snigger and call him a mandrake to his face. Mandrake. Queer. Homosexual, that was the newly coined medical and legal term. He found all those terms objectionable, not least because he resented the connotations of weakness and effeminacy.  

When Parish turned away without a word Raffles and Beck kept quiet until  he resumed his position at the other end of the kitchen. Beck coughed and wiped his mouth on his arrow printed sleeve. “I got a ten stretch, but I’m out in two year if I don’t get me collar felt ‘elping you.”

“And what the blazes will you do with yourself then, Beck?  In two years you’ll be too old to work and too decrepit to steal-”

“Too whata?”

“Decrepit,” hissed Raffles. “It means weak and feeble, and where do the weak and feeble go? Out of here and straight into the workhouse next door, unless of course they’ve got a little nest egg set aside for their old age.”

“I ain’t going in the bleedin’ spike.”  Beck’s gnarled hands quivered. “ I ain’t.”

“Keep your damn voice down.” Raffles plucked the slimy potato out of Beck’s hand before he dropped it.  “So how you going to keep body and soul together when you leave here?”

Beck shrugged his misshapen shoulders.  “Dunno…a couple o’ ponies ain’t near enough chink, it’d take a ton.”

Raffles had expected that.  “Very well, a hundred pounds instead of fifty, provided that you’re able set things up to my satisfaction.”

“A ton.” Beck’s eyes gleamed. “That’ll do me nice. I ain’t never ‘ad that much chink.”

“What about the arrangements?” snapped Raffles.

“Ain’t much more to it, Clarkie, wot brought your mate’s address over from the villa, he’s in. He can get yer the lockpick for a pony an’ a crack at the ladder.”

Raffles hadn’t intended for anyone else to escape with him, still it wasn’t such a bad idea. If Clark got away the police would have two escaped convicts to search for instead of one, and if he didn’t his attempt would only add to the general confusion. “Tell him that I want the lockpick first and make sure that he understands that he goes up after me.”

“Got yer.”

“What about my clothes?” He wasn’t going to get far in his prison uniform.

“Anderson in B wing can fit yer up with some togs. He used to be a tailor before he bashed that bloke’s ‘ead in. He wants fifty for his trouble though.”

“I could buy a suit in Seville Row for considerably less than that.”

Beck gruffled. “Not now, yer couldn’t. They don’t deliver round ‘ere.”

“Nevertheless, you can tell Anderson that I’ll pay twenty-five.” Fifty pounds was exorbitant even by prison standards and he couldn’t afford to let anyone think that he was a soft touch.  There were no Queensbury rules here, no notions of fair play, and he had fought hard, sometimes literally, to establish his reputation as a ‘nasty piece of work’ as Beck put it. That was the route to survival and he couldn’t afford to undermine his vicious bastard persona now.  Not that it was entirely undeserved, there was a ruthlessness in him which Bunny lacked He could only hope that his partner in crime had faired reasonably well during his time in Pentonville. And perhaps he had, for hadn’t his rabbit proved to be a veritable lion?

Raffles knew that Bunny had kept their pact of silence and how desperate the police were when MacKenzie offered him the chance to turn Queen’s evidence.  As they could ever pin all his past crimes on poor Bunny and make a case which would stand up in court. It was a trick of course, one final attempt to get a confession out of him by fair means or foul. He had laughed in their faces and discovered that costermonger’s cur Micklewaite was handy with his fists. MacKenzie  had intervened though, the Scotchman’s old-fashioned sense of decency would be his undoing in the end.

Beck shook his grizzled head. “Anderson won’t like it.”

“I don’t give a tinker’s damn whether he likes it or not. I’ll pay twenty-five  and not a brass farthing more. If that isn’t good enough for him then you can find me somebody else.”

“Won’t ‘ave too,” Beck admitted. “He’s got a poorly missus and a four kids on the outside, you promise to get the chink to his old lady and he’ll kit yer out, no bother.”

“Good. That’s settled then.”  A fortune in bribes and a slim chance of making it over the wall into the workhouse next door. Then a twenty foot drop into a hay cart waiting in the alley which ran alongside the spike, assuming that it was waiting. If he got that far he’d go for the bloody jump even if it wasn’t and chance breaking his neck on the cobbles below. Anything was better than another four and a half years of lonely, tedious imprisonment. He had only stuck it this long because it hadn’t  seemed quite sporting to escape whilst Bunny was still locked up. 

And the truth was life on the run without Bunny would be no life at all. His tongue-tied, hopeless at cricket, Bunny had earned his affection and approval when he was his fag at school. He was loyal and stout-hearted, and he’d made a rather fetching Juliet in the school play, even if he had been dreadfully gauche. Some of the boys had sniggered when he’d fluffed his lines and tripped over the hem of his dress, but his fond smile and bold wink had given Bunny the mettle to continue. There was more to him than the others imagined, far more than he had ever deserved. 

*

A train to Newhaven where they caught the ferry to Dieppe, on to Copenhagen and then northwards to Bergen. Even at one o’clock in the afternoon it was well below freezing outside and all Raffles could see through the hotel room window was the white whirl of wind-driven snow. It was warm inside though with a log fire crackling merrily in the grate, warmer by far than it had ever been in the Scrubs. There he would have been out breaking icy rocks in the blizzard, not lazing the afternoon away with a bank of soft pillows at his back. Nor would he have had Bunny sitting up beside him apparently engrossed in ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’. 

And there was the canker in the bud of what ought to have been an idyllic afternoon. The tense silence was getting wearisome. Ever since they’d left London Bunny had vacillated between anger and adoration. From the set of his mouth anger definitely had the upper hand at the moment, but perhaps he could charm him out of his sulks. Raffles curled his finger under the soft hair at the nape of Bunny’s neck. “Your Pentonville crop is growing out rather nicely.”

Bunny batted his hand away. “Don’t.”

It was an effort to keep his temper in check, but a display of impatience would only drive Bunny further away. His rabbit needed to be coaxed, not criticised. Raffles watched the snow piling up on the wide windowsill. “This reminds me of when we were boys at school, sneaking up to my study at midnight to watch the snow blanketing the fields.”

Bunny slammed his book shut. “Yes, I remember those rare occasions when we huddled together on the window seat in your study. They meant the world to me, but how often did you leave me to sit up half the night waiting for you to return from your nocturnal wanderings? I’d be nearly frozen and worn out with worry by the time you came back and you’d never tell me what you’d been up to.”

Raffles was taken aback by the vermence of this long held grievance. “There wasn’t an awful lot to tell, old boy. I’d dress up in that hideous check suit and a false beard which itched like the devil and wander about the town. I’d go into the public houses and listen to the talk there, I can still manage a fair Rutland accent, or I’d walk down the Leicester Road to watch the poor wretches queuing for admission to the workhouse. I learnt some language there which would have turned the headmaster’s hair white.”

Bunny glared at him. “If that was all you did, then why not tell me about it at the time?” He rubbed his forehead and voiced his suspicions. “I was far too innocent to think of it then, but I’ve wondered about it for years - did you go with men?”

Only absolute honesty would satisfy Bunny now. “Only twice, my disguise wasn’t designed to attract that sort of attention and it was a small town. The first was an out of work farmhand who preferred my company to the queue for the casual ward of the workhouse and the other was the local curate. There was a girl as well, a pretty maid of all the work, with whom I behaved rather caddishly, but I soon decided the clergy was rather more to my taste.”

“Then why the hell did you pay court to that silly girl on the Uhlan?” 

“Ah, so that’s what all this is about.” Raffles turned around on the bed so that he sat facing Bunny. “She was a plausible diversion, you fool, a smokescreen so that no one wondered why we were sharing a cabin on a half-empty boat. Once we made port you and I would have been away with the pearl, and that would have been the end of my shipboard flirtation.”

“You asked her to marry you.”

“I didn’t mean it!”

“Yes, you did,” said Bunny after a long moment of silence. “I remember how angry you were when you asked me why you shouldn’t marry, as if we didn’t both know the answer to that. It wasn’t so much that you were smitten by her youthful charms as that you were half in love with the whole idea of the thing. The handsome cricketer and his blushing bride, part of you liked the idea of being married, of being respectable. Of being normal.”

Raffles swallowed heavily, knowing that he’d been well and truly bowled out. He wasn’t one for introspection, but prison gave a chap plenty of time to ponder his own motives. “Perhaps I did, you know how wearisome it gets to always have to hide in the shadows. Why else did you break with me and take yourself off to Thames Ditton to scrape a living as a writer? I wouldn’t have gone through with it though, especially not in the wake of our long separation.” He curled his hand around Bunny’s neck and this time he was not rebuffed. “Cricket and crime weren’t the same without my rabbit.”

Bunny shrugged. “Did you ever hear from her again?”

“One letter, full of all the foolish things that young women say when they’ve convinced themselves that they’re heartbroken. I never answered it, Bunny.”

“Why not?”

“What could I have said that wouldn’t have twisted the knife in the wound? That I would have abandoned her the instant we reached land and that even if I hadn’t our life together would have been built of deceit and ill-gotten gains. That I’m an invert, a mandrake, a homosexual .That I never loved her because I’ve only ever loved you.” 

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Bunny cleared his throat. “I may have despised her, but everything else aside it wouldn’t be proper for a young girl to know such things.”

Raffles’ smile was tinged with sadness. Bunny might still retain his innate sense of propriety, but once his declaration of love would have been enough to send him tumbling into his arms. No more it seemed. Yet there were tears in those soft brown eyes. “Bunny?”

“Everyone thinks that I’m basically a good person, a decent chap, but I’m not. I just never had the courage to be really bad on my own.” Bunny clasped Raffles’ hand. “Instead I went half to the devil. My father wasn’t born to money and he worked himself into an early grave to provide for me, his only son, and I squandered it all in less than three years. I was a desperate man when I came to the Albany that night and I’ve have been a dead one if it wasn’t for you.”

“You’ve precious little to thank me for, a life of crime, a life on the run.”

“A life.” Bunny raised Raffles hand to his lips. “One I would never have had, for I had resolved to make an end of myself that night all those years ago. You’ve frayed my nerves and tried my patience with all your madcap schemes, but I’ll tell you now what I told you then, I can’t go back and I wouldn’t if I could.”

“Then we must go forward you and I.” The smoke from the fire was making his eyes smart. “We could try our luck across the Atlantic or down in the southern hemisphere. On the other hand I’ve always had a fancy to see St Petersburg, that jeweller chap there makes the most amazing things, gem encrusted eggs and the such like. And there’s still Capri and the Bay of Naples, do you remember how I promised you fairylands forlorn?”

“Yes, rather. I had to burn your lovely letter but I memorised it first.” Bunny sounded much more like his old self. Then he sighed. “I don’t suppose that we shall ever be able to go home again?”

“Not back to the dear old Albany, no, but we could sneak into England in a few years under assumed names.” Raffles gestured that the snowscape beyond their cosy room. “However, we appear to be stranded here for the moment.”

Bunny smiled. “That may not be such a bad thing.”

Raffles chuckled and pointed at the novel on the eiderdown. “It’ll give you time to finish your book.”

“I hate Thomas Hardy. He’s so unrelentingly grim.” Bunny dropped the book onto the floor. “It would have driven me mad if I’d had to read much more of it.”

“Have you only forgiven me to save yourself from The Mayor of Casterbridge?”

Bunny laughed and held him close. “I’d rather sleep with MacKenzie than plough through any more of that, but in the absence of the inspector I suppose that you’ll just have to do.”

 


End file.
